A monk in chilly Tibet couldn't make sense of Comrade Calamity's baloney: QUENTIN LETTS sees the Labour leader make U-turn upon U-turn

To complete his successful day – the cherry atop calamity – Jeremy Corbyn nipped up to Peterborough to U-turn on two earlier U-turns, or something like that. A driving instructor might have called it a nine-point turn. A livestock farmer would have thought it a piglet’s tail.

On Monday night we had been told he was going to embrace Brexit and dump his belief in ‘free movement’ (ie open immigration).

But in some off-piste broadcast interviews yesterday morning, Mr Corbyn said ‘we’re not saying anyone couldn’t come here’. Oh. So he DID still want free movement.

Jeremy Corbyn nipped up to Peterborough to U-turn on two earlier U-turns, or something like that. A driving instructor might have called it a nine-point turn

With that he detonated a political stinkbomb and said he wanted a national maximum wage. Any pay above that would be confiscated. Fat cats would be whacked by a tax rate of 100 per cent. Interviewers fretted about the impact this might have on footballers’ emoluments.

Mr Corbyn shrugged. He did not care so long as people had stopped asking him about that confounded immigration thing.

Declining to say what sum he envisaged for the top permitted level of pay (though he was glad to confirm it would be higher than his own salary of £138,000), Mr Corbyn adjusted his blue revolutionary cap on his head and jumped on a train to Cambridgeshire. Scramble for King’s Cross, lads!

In some off-piste broadcast interviews yesterday morning, Mr Corbyn said ‘we’re not saying anyone couldn’t come here’. Oh. So he DID still want free movement

I happened to catch the same train. Old Corbyn, grinning like a gold prospector who’d been at the moonshine, alighted in Peterborough with a merry skip in the heels. Zip-a-dee-do-dah, what a scrumptious day. He was pursued by faintly liverish-looking aides whose trousers flapped in the Fens afternoon as they struggled to keep pace with their great helmsman.

We cartwheeled along to the Paston Farm community centre with a cinema capable of holding perhaps 75 people.

The centre’s normal clientele of arts-and-crafts-lesson pensioners looked on with puzzlement as the TV trucks and taxis screeched to a halt outside their door and Fleet Street’s finest descended with notebooks, neurotic iPhones and long-lens cameras.

Mr Corbyn adjusted his blue revolutionary cap on his head and jumped on a train to Cambridgeshire

Enter Communicator Corbyn, a glint in his eye as he prepared to cause yet more confusion. He really did look delighted by his progress.

‘Labour is not wedded to freedom of movement for EU citizens as a point of principle,’ he said. Ah-ha! Take it down, Carruthers.

But then he spooned up some more. ‘I don’t want that to be misinterpreted,’ he said. Nooo. Heaven forfend. A tiny pause, floated in the breeze like a Jim Laker googlie. Then: ‘Nor do we rule it out.’ Eh? He didn’t want to be misinterpreted – but he did not ‘rule out’ the opposite of what he had just signalled? The man was a riddle in an enigma wrapped up in a self-contradiction, so cryptic that not even a Buddhist monk squatting cross-legged on the chilliest mountain peak in Tibet would be able to decipher his baloney.

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The few activists present looked a bit perplexed. A Communications Union chap in front of me rubbed his jaw.

The TV correspondents (the only ones allowed to ask questions) sought some elucidation. But you might as well have tried to untangle a bowl of spaghetti.

On this day when, we had been told, Mr Corbyn would claim back Labour voters worried about immigration, he triumphantly asserted that immigration was a wonderful thing. ‘We’ve done well out of those who have come here.’

On this day when, we had been told, Mr Corbyn would claim back Labour voters worried about immigration, he triumphantly asserted that immigration was a wonderful thing

The whack-the-rich stinkbomb came out again – but it, too, had been tweaked.

No longer did he talk of a maximum salary. Now, with fervour in his voice, he talked of pay ratios in companies. He suggested that no firm supplying the Government should pay its top executive more than £150,000.

Ha! That won’t go down well with the drugs companies, arms man- ufacturers or the likes of Capita and KPMG.

It will never happen, but it will win Comrade Calamity some headlines. It will get voters talking about him. Bonkers? Or Trumpishly brilliant?